I beg to differ. Freezing roasted beans significantly arrests the staling process. If you're picking up off flavors in your freezer, you need to clean your fridge! :^)

Seriously though, airtight bags and containers should prevent the beans from picking up strange tastes and odors. We're talking about a few days here not months.

Roasted beans have a spike when they're at their best. The espresso shot quality builds to a peak and then fades. In my experience, freezing the beans spreads out the time of the peak without diminishing the height. YMMV.

I beg to differ. Freezing roasted beans significantly arrests the staling process. If you're picking up off flavors in your freezer, you need to clean your fridge! :^)

Seriously though, airtight bags and containers should prevent the beans from picking up strange tastes and odors. We're talking about a few days here not months.

Roasted beans have a spike when they're at their best. The espresso shot quality builds to a peak and then fades. In my experience, freezing the beans spreads out the time of the peak without diminishing the height. YMMV.

I don't know about all that. I do know that all plastic bags breathe. Anything in the fridge or freezer in a plastic bag will exchange tastes over a week. Water vapor tends to condense and speeds the molecule transfer. Remember that the inside of most fridges is plastic, which outgasses constantly. Go to any store selling fridges, open a door and take a deep breath.

Yum - plastic coffee. This is the why of aluminized plastic bags for transporting roasted coffee. Aluminum, too, outgasses, but not as rapidly as plastic (tighter molecular structure for Al). Green beans won't pick up or lose flavors as rapidly simply because they are more dense. It does happen, though. Just because someone ignores it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Airtight glass jars are infinitely better.

Just my 2 cents.Kristi

Edited 5-19-2012 - the above is very stale advice. I get roasted beans from Jeff Pentel ( redbirdcoffee.com )and freeze them in 1 pint Mason jars with no loss in taste over half a year, maybe longer.

Yes, strictly speaking everything breathes and outgasses at some level--including the beans and the PLASTIC hopper on your grinder. Plus, there's a pretty good chance that your favorite roaster stores the beans in PLASTIC pails before you take them home. Frankly, there's more important things to worry about than whether your beans are stored in proximity to plastic. Glass might be less permeable and less prone to exchanging taste but glass jars, unless they're completely full, allow more oxygen to contact the beans. In my experience, the best way to store fresh beans is in a tightly clinched, foil-lined plastic bag in the freezer.

Reducing the temperature slows down virtually every chemical and physical change (other things like humidity, being equal). Beans are at their very best only for a day or two unless you take steps to preserve their freshness. Freezing is simply the easiest way to spread that time window out. My shots made with frozen beans are clearly better than those made from the same supply of beans left at room temperature in the plastic hopper for several days after the peak. Anyone can easily repeat this test themselves and decide if it helps or hurts. (This presumes you have good fresh beans to begin with--it probably won't make a difference with month-old Charbucks.)

The scientist in me wonders if the frozen beans might also benefit from maintaining a lower temperature through the grinding process. They start out frozen but end up roughly at room temperature instead of being heated above room temperature by the grinder. Perhaps this might be an easy way to get some of the advantages of an slow turning, low-temp Versalab M3 grinder on the cheap.

Nice, I bleed the steam too, and it makes an obvious difference: the initial stream coming out of the PF is smooth, instead of squirting out under pressure.

I don't leave the steam open, however, but I'll definately try it.

**WARNING, plot spoilage ahead!!!** I hesitate to do this, but I gotta be honest:

@#$%ing Silvia. I don't know if my palate is just more sophisticated, or what, but she's killing me. The fussiness, aarrgghh! I need temperature stability and lower pressure. I need $1200.

Seriously, I would have a hard time recommending Silvia to someone. She IS awesome...if you brew 1 drink in 20 minutes, if you don't use lots of different blends, if you are satisfied with 'good', if...

IF you think you may really get into espresso, I'd run, fast. If you want to have more than a 1:1000 chance of reproducing the odd fluke god-shot, run. If you want to have great espresso all the time, run.

If silvia is the max your budget allows, you got the best you can get, no doubt. But if you can swing a couple hundred more, save yourself the headache and do it.

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